Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a writer, scholar, educator, curator and translator. Her creative/critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in NACLA Report on the Americas, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, New England Review, Theatre, Jewish Currents, Social Text Online, The Rumpus, The Offing, Academy of American Poets Poet-a-Day, and elsewhere. She is the author of three poetry and essay chapbooks, most recently Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone’s Eyes (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2019). For her poetry, she is the recipient of a CantoMundo Fellowship.
As a researcher, Maryam is completing a Ph.D. at Yale University in American Studies and African American Studies (expected, 2025). Her comparative interdisciplinary research centers twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, art and performance in the western hemisphere. She is currently working long-term on two research projects: the first is a study of collecting, materiality, and the transfiguration of loss in the repair-seeking practices of minoritarian writers and artists from across the Americas, in pursuit of justices foreclosed by the workings of imperialism and coloniality at large. The second is a literary and cultural study of the “emergence” of the U.S. Salvadoran diaspora in a relational, multi-ethnic and transnational context. Her work has been supported by a Deans Emerging Scholar Research Award and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale. She has also been recognized for her “exceptional promise as a teacher” with a 2021-2022 Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
With the U.S. Central American collective Tierra Narrative, Maryam has co-curated transnational literatures and works in translation from throughout the Americas for The Poetry Project and FENCE magazine. Most recently, she produced and co-created the Tierra Narrative multimedia film project Que hora es en el reloj del mundo? / What Time is it on the Clock of the World? (2024), commissioned by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. With TN member Óscar Moisés Díaz, she also co-edited a folio of Salvadoran women writers, all made available in English by translators of Salvadoran heritage, published by FENCE Steaming in 2025.
Since 2021, Maryam has taught virtual critical-creative writing workshops that have been taken by artists, scholars, and writers from around the world. Learn more about her workshop offerings here.
Maryam grew up in the Alief neighborhood of Houston, Texas with familial roots in eastern El Salvador and northern Iran.